Wednesday

A new campaign has recently launched for the Worldwide Short Film Festival (brought to us by the Canadian film center). You might remember a few of the :15's that ran last year if you went to the annual event (winners of the Silver Pencil at the One Show and Gold at the Bessies). Here's one of 'em:

To help promote this year's event, the next iteration of the campaign carries on with the "Short Attention Span" idea and amplifies it in a few unique ways. Along with a number of new spots, the campaign also contains a full-length music video:

To be honest, I found the video a bit strange when I first viewed it. That being said, it is good to see clients take chances with creating content like this. It's also excellent to see creative teams build on great ideas rather than tear them down and re-think new (mostly worse) ones. I think that the strategy behind this idea is great and the spots raise awareness (quickly) about the event.

Next year, I think that they could do some innovative digital tactics - especially with the site. If I have a short attention span (which I do), make it extremely easy to get the information I want. In fact, check out this Mini site from a year or so back and you'll see what I mean. I love the "enter how much time you have" utility and the way the site quickly customizes to what you want.

All in all, it's nice to see a campaign built around a solid idea. The extensions for this are limitless and hopefully the smart folks behind this campaign keep it up for the next few years.

Imagine if you applied these types of client requests to other real-world situations. I'd love to go to future shop and redo my home entertainment system but demand that payment needed to be deferred for 120 days ala InBev. Nice work, Leo.

Tuesday

Last week, a friend of mine was telling me about all the cool stuff that happened on the day he was born - popular songs, notable deaths, the time the sun rose, etc. Pretty random stuff - so random that I wondered how he knew all of it. A birthday site perhaps?

Sort of.

Wolfgram|Alpha is a new type of search engine. It allows a user to compare different terms (for example, the stock price of Apple vs. Google), answers specific questions instantly (2 x 100, for example) and provides accurate answers to detailed questions. Unlike Google, it doesn't have a laundry list of potentially right places to find your answer, it just gives it to you in seconds.

Even though the site is still in beta and has recently launched, it's ambitious goal could help propel it ahead of popular engines in the future:

"Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries."

What I love about this engine is that it has a defined objective that is appealing to the masses - become the resource to quickly answer factual queries. As a University student, it took me a long time to figure out "how" to search Google to find the articles and facts I was looking for. Should I phrase it like this or like that? A lot of the time, you don't get anywhere and waste hours scrolling through page after page with the hopes of finding what you're looking for.Wolfram|Alpha gives users what they crave - correct answers, one click away.

Could Google replicate a model like this? Maybe. But I think that Wolfram|Alpha might have a jump start on them and in the world wide web, the place that users gravitate too first usually has a huge advantage on the competition.

Monday

Please forgive the lack of posts over the last few weeks. Paul and I have been busy at work and also organizing a big event coming in September. AdJoke is going to keep on rolling and we recently learned that one blog listing site has ranked our little blog one of the top ad blogs in the world (#95th to be exact).

But enough gloating, here's 5 links to check out:

Justin.tv claims that its users upload more videos than YouTube. Right.

A jackass American conservative radio hosts decides to get water boardered because he doesn't think it's torture. To our delight, he was wrong.

I'm a big fan of young creatives putting together great work. There's something about the potential of going to Cannes as a Young Lion that seems to inspire people from around the world. I think that entries are still open but hurry, there are already a number of great ones on YouTube. Here is my personal favorite:

Well done Grasshopper. Apparently Grasshopper is a telcom provider in the US that offers a specialized service for Small Businesses that includes unlimited extensions, call forwarding, professional greeting, etc.

To gain attention for their service they created this inspirational video that has 90,000 views 20 some days into the campaign and I have a feeling that this will only grow immensely over the next 30 days.

To help the video reach as many people as possible they have posted it to YouTube and enabled users to share it via Twitter, Facebook and all of the other usual suspects.